A binge watching of RED RIDING TRILOGY, three TV movies adapted from David Peace's RED RIDING QUARTET, where its second chapter 1977 is skipped. Directed by three different directors in three different formats: 1974 by Julian Jarrold in 16mm film, 1980 by James Marsh in 35mm film and 1983 by Anand Tucked with Red One digital camera, the trilogy forebodingly trawls into the organized crimes and police corruption in West Yorkshire through the prisms of three different protagonists while they are wrestling with a series of murder cases, and overall, it inspires to achieve a vérité similitude of the bleak milieu while sometimes being mired with its own navel- gazing, such as narrative banality (1974), over-calculated formality (1980) and poorly indicated flashback sequences (1983).
The police corruption which disclosed in 1974 turns out to be just a tip of a humongous iceberg, in 1980, after the inaction of the current head Bill Molloy (Clarke), our protagonist is Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter (Considine, in an atypical clean-cut appearance), who takes up the gauntlet to investigate the notorious Yorkshire Ripper case (inspired by the real events), which has already claimed a dozen lives, mainly female prostitutes. But soon he will meet more resistance and pressure from within the police department when he is tipped that one of the victims might not be the ripper's work. The tension retains in a high-strung tenor when we see a diligent Peter being taunted by the reprobates on a daily base, in particular from officer Bob Craven (Harris, reprised his role from 1974, and he is so delectably sinister through and through), the lowest scum of the earth. There are some gnawing hitches mined in the narrative, a key confessor is timely dispatched when he refuses to divulge the information on the phone but also has no intention to meet Peter in the hotel where he stays, instead, he asks Peter to come to his home in the witching hour, only to a sorry outcome. Also, it is unwarranted for Peter to appoint Helen Marshall (Peake), his former adulteress, into his team, to further complicate his scrape, plus a superfluous subplot of his broody effort is ironically dismissed by Helen's unsolicited abortion. After finally revealing the bloody picture of that singular murder (not done by the ripper), which connects to the finale of 1974, the story again, sets up a chilling twist to be brutally honest about to which rank extent the forces of law and order has been sullied.
The police corruption which disclosed in 1974 turns out to be just a tip of a humongous iceberg, in 1980, after the inaction of the current head Bill Molloy (Clarke), our protagonist is Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter (Considine, in an atypical clean-cut appearance), who takes up the gauntlet to investigate the notorious Yorkshire Ripper case (inspired by the real events), which has already claimed a dozen lives, mainly female prostitutes. But soon he will meet more resistance and pressure from within the police department when he is tipped that one of the victims might not be the ripper's work. The tension retains in a high-strung tenor when we see a diligent Peter being taunted by the reprobates on a daily base, in particular from officer Bob Craven (Harris, reprised his role from 1974, and he is so delectably sinister through and through), the lowest scum of the earth. There are some gnawing hitches mined in the narrative, a key confessor is timely dispatched when he refuses to divulge the information on the phone but also has no intention to meet Peter in the hotel where he stays, instead, he asks Peter to come to his home in the witching hour, only to a sorry outcome. Also, it is unwarranted for Peter to appoint Helen Marshall (Peake), his former adulteress, into his team, to further complicate his scrape, plus a superfluous subplot of his broody effort is ironically dismissed by Helen's unsolicited abortion. After finally revealing the bloody picture of that singular murder (not done by the ripper), which connects to the finale of 1974, the story again, sets up a chilling twist to be brutally honest about to which rank extent the forces of law and order has been sullied.